ABSTRACT
Leibniz posited that the fundamental building blocks of the world are simple substances, i.e., monads. The received view is that this kind of metaphysical system (i.e., a monadology) was dead and buried after Kant. In this chapter I argue that this view is dead wrong. I do so by focusing on two twentieth-century monadologists: the American idealist George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) and the psychologist and British idealist James Ward (1843–1925). I show that these philosophers revived the “monadology” because they regarded it as the only metaphysical system on the market that could be made compatible with Darwin’s theory of evolution. Nonetheless, they recognized that in order to make it fully compatible with Darwinism, Leibniz’s monadological metaphysics required some modifications. I argue that despite some promising moves, Howison failed to develop a new monadology fully appropriate for Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Nonetheless, I show from unpublished correspondence that both the failures and successes of this new monadology inspired Ward to develop his own. Ward, I argue, developed a monadology fully compatible with nineteenth-century Darwinian evolutionary theory.
